New Warhammer 40,000: Weapons Part 2

Today, we’re taking a look at a few of the simple rules changes in the new rules for weapons, but ones that have some pretty cool in-game effects.

Twin-linked Weapons

If you play Warhammer 40,000 today, you’ll know that there are a lot of twin-linked weapons about. These let you re-roll to hit dice, making them generally quite reliable, but potentially no more deadly than a single weapon. In the new Warhammer 40,000, twin-linked weapons instead get double the number of shots.

This is a massive boost to a lot of units. Many vehicles, in particular, are going to be kicking out ruinous amounts of firepower – your Land Raider, for example, almost doubles in effectiveness. With its twin heavy bolters and now utterly lethal godhammer pattern lascannons, it becomes, quite rightly, one of the most powerful models in the game.

Orks as well, renowned for their habit of twin-linking for “more dakka”, gain a lot of bullets from this change. Just think about the number of shots those Waaagh!-planes will be firing now!

Combi-weapons

Another type of weapon that is changing is the combi-weapon. While in the current edition you can only shoot the “specialist” portion of the gun once, in the new Warhammer 40,000 you can either shoot both all the time, but at a -1 to hit modifier, or choose to just shoot one with no modifier. This is a pretty awesome boost in power for a lot of elite units like Chaos Terminators, Sternguard and Meganobz – no longer just one-hit-wonders with those shooting attacks.

Explosives

Warhammer 40,000 has no shortage of things that go ‘boom’. Whereas once these weapons would have used a template, in the new Warhammer 40,000, these are resolved much faster by just using a random number of shots. This represents either how many warriors are caught in the explosion, or how direct the hit is on a larger single-model target. Otherwise, these work exactly as any other shooting.

Explosives tend to work pretty well now against both numerous infantry and large individual models, but not as well against either dedicated anti-infantry or anti-tank weapons.